PAGE ONE -- Poland Looks to NATO To Cure Historical Curse

Frank Viviano, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, July 10, 1997

1997-07-10 04:00:00 PDT Warsaw -- For Poles, the arrival of President Clinton in Warsaw today, on the heels of their country's successful bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, marks nothing less than the achievement of a 1,000-year-old dream.

The bid also opens perilous new ground for NATO. In Poland, the alliance inherits not only a respected modern army, but a deeply troubled legacy -- a state that has been demolished and redrawn endlessly by its aggressive neighbors, one of whom is NATO's European linchpin.

"NATO is taking on a country with history's most volatile frontiers," said Konrad Fialkowski, a lawyer who helped draft the contracts used to privatize Poland's state industries after the collapse of communism.

Along with Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic will be the first ex-communist states to enter the alliance as soon as their own parliaments and NATO's 16 member governments certify the terms of admission. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott called the proposed expansion "one of the more momentous decisions" ever taken by NATO or the United States.

With 39 million people, a booming economy and one of the largest military forces in Europe, Poland is by far the most important newcomer. And according to surveys, Poles are nearly unanimous in supporting membership.

Yet unlike the recent transfer of Hong Kong to Chinese control, the shifting of the West's outer boundaries to the Russian-Polish frontier is passing in eerie silence rather than grand celebrations.

Yesterday, Foreign Ministry staffers in downtown Warsaw gave away tickets for President Clinton's only public address in Warsaw, scheduled for this afternoon in the city's central Castle Square, to any passer-by interested in attending.

The apparent public indifference "is only the surface," said Tadeusz Wisniewski, director of news programming for Polish Public Broadcasting. "Under the skin, the feeling is quite different."

This is the complicated and often self-absorbed nation that the West has invited into its alliance: a bright young democracy ready to become a European power -- and another Poland "under the skin," defined by endlessly unstable borders and a tortured past.

The other Poland begins in the Masuria region, a rolling landscape of glacial lakes 150 miles northeast of Warsaw. It is a modest holiday area abloom with family hotels, where the new Polish, Lithuanian and Russian middle class vacations alongside budget-minded Germans.

At rural Masurian crossroads, less fortunate Russians sell cheap souvenirs from the trunks of rusted cars. The menus of local restaurants offer Berliner schnitzel and Warsaw-style dumplings, to be washed down with generous amounts of inexpensive Russian champagne.

In their way, the vacationers, menus and souvenir hustlers are all allusions to redrawn maps -- and to the relentless fact of Poland's life that distinguishes it from every current or proposed member of the Western alliance.

"We have been one of the largest states in Europe at certain times, and erased altogether at others," notes Fialkowski.

At some junctures in the past 10 centuries, Masuria has been the heart of a Polish commonwealth that stretched deep into present- day Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and Russia -- whose borders now crisscross the Masurian lakes. At others, it has been a remote dominion of greater Sweden, a conquered dependency of Moscow, as well as the hinterland of East Prussia, a German beachhead on the upper reaches of the Baltic Sea.

Masuria's red-brick railroad stations are still embellished with the municipal shields of their Prussian builders, the German town names painted over and replaced with Polish ones. The regional capital, Olstyn, was "Allenstein" as late as 1944, a major eastern outpost of the Third Reich.

For five centuries, the flat plain that will now guard NATO's eastern defenses has been one of the world's principal invasion routes -- sacked in turn by Russian armies marching west and German armies marching east.

From 1795 to 1921, the state of Poland entirely vanished, gobbled up by Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Prussia.

"This, as much as anything else, is what we hope to achieve with NATO membership: that we will finally overcome the curse of our history, the curse of our geography," said Maciej Kozlowski.

"Curse" might seem a peculiar word for the vocabulary of a renowned historian and seasoned diplomat. Kozlowski, the former charge d'affaires at the
Polish Embassy
in Washington, has published more than 1,000 scholarly articles and newspaper commentaries in his long career.

But even the most accomplished Poles believe their nation is cursed.

The evidence lies under the skin -- in ruins that are etched into the national consciousness, decades after new buildings have replaced the piles of shattered brick and burned timber that were all that remained of most Polish cities in 1945.

To walk through Warsaw with one of its native sons or daughters is to tour a city that most visitors so not see. No corner of it is more alive in the imagination than the downtown area where the Warsaw Ghetto once stood.

As a schoolgirl, Dr. Inka Wereszczynska helped rebuild the district, searching vast mounds of rubble for usable bricks. The day before the NATO announcement, she accompanied a reporter through its streets.

In the shadows of nondescript postwar apartment buildings, fields of weed stretch over what was for four years the most densely populated community on earth. "The Nazis packed 450,000 human beings into about 75 square blocks here in 1940, then walled it off and left them to starve," recalled Wereszczynska, a retired anesthesiologist.

By June 1942, 100,000 of the ghetto's occupants were dead of starvation or disease. By October, another 300,000 had been shipped off to the gas chambers at Treblinka. In April 1943, the survivors mounted an armed assault, with stolen guns, against the tanks and artillery of the German army.

"The Ghetto held out against the Wehrmacht for almost two months," said Wereszczynska. "Then it was leveled to the ground. One year later, the rest of Warsaw rose up against the Nazis and 80 percent of it, too, was leveled by German troops. This is the city I spent my childhood in."

The 31-year-old Fialkowski is too young to have worked in the rubble of old Warsaw. But in his mind's eye, like Wereszczynska, he sees it still, and he can show a visitor the exact location of hundreds of vanished buildings.

His tour brings a visitor to a Warsaw military cemetery. One side of its central lane is an enormous expanse of stone markers, the graves of soldiers killed when the Red Army invaded Poland. The other side is full of wooden crosses, commemorating thousands of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts who died fighting in the Warsaw Uprising.

"How can we pretend that the curse of Poland will ever be lifted?" he asked. "It would be like asking history to end, and that isn't about to happen."

But many Poles want precisely that: an end to history. NATO, for them, is tacitly understood as a way of reinventing Poland, of putting its tortured shadows to rest.

According to the Warsaw- based Public Opinion Research Center, 80 percent of Poles would vote "yes" if a referendum were held on membership. "There is absolute agreement on the issue among Poland's political parties," adds Maciej Jankowski, chairman of the opposition Solidarity coalition in Warsaw.

A visitor points out that Germany, the neighbor that razed Warsaw and murdered one Pole in four in the 1940s, is the most powerful European state in NATO. Isn't Poland simply exchanging the domination of one historic enemy, Russia, for a risky marriage to another?

Poles don't see it that way. When they speak of joining NATO, they mean "America," not a transatlantic alliance of 16 co-equal nations.

"We are the most pro-American country on Earth," Foreign Ministry official Kozlowski flatly declares, explaining Poland's nearly universal support for NATO admission.

"To be the frontline of the United States in Europe is infinitely better than being the front line of Russia in Western Europe," agrees Jankowski. "For us, there is no alternative to American leadership, period."

The European members of NATO are well aware of Poland's sentiments. This is one unspoken reason why Paris, Rome and Bonn have lobbied for the early admission of Romania and Slovenia -- which have traditionally looked for leadership to France, Italy and Germany -- as a counterbalance.

Their arguments, pointing out that Europe has its own interests to defend in NATO conclaves, have had little effect on Poles.

"Through all of the years of communism, the United States was a mythic place for us, where everyone was young, rich and healthy, and the dollar could buy anything," said Tadeusz Wisniewski.

"To a large degree, the myth is still alive, and it is the model for Poland's own effort to reinvent itself today, not only in NATO but in every aspect of society."

The United States is the No. 1 bankroller of that reinvention. "Our members alone account for one-third of the $18 billion in foreign direct investments authorized in Poland," said Tony Housh, executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Warsaw.

The code word for Poland's reinvention is "normal," said
Piotr Kaczkowski
. "Poles want to believe they can live, finally, in a normal country, with normal expectations and normal fears. They feel that their chance for such a life has finally dawned."

Kaczkowski has been Poland's best-known broadcast personality for three decades, making the transition from communism to capitalism without skipping a beat on his celebrated nationwide radio program, "The Lost Music Office." Listeners call in questions about records they may have heard Kaczkowski play as long as 35 years ago. The questions often lead far beyond music, to heated on-the-air debates over every conceivable subject.

Concentrated in their late 40s or 50s, the program's regular listeners are from the Poland that slept through the long, austere paralysis of Soviet communism -- dreaming of a mythical America and taping Kaczkowski's eclectic broadcasts of Frank Zappa, Jefferson Airplane and Ella Fitzgerald albums that could not be easily purchased in Poland.

"We identified ourselves then not by what we had, but rather by what we lacked," he said. "Poland was the country that had no bananas or lemons or oranges," much less American-style democracy.

By contrast, Warsaw experienced a price war on imported bananas this summer, Michael Jackson flew in to shop for a castle in the Polish countryside, and Kaczkowski flew out to interview Elton John in London.

Poles are quiet about the symbolic import of NATO, Kaczkowski said, because they are holding their breath, "afraid that the normal world will disappear if we welcome it too loudly."